- 4 months ago
This week on The Cameron Journal Newshour, Cameron croaks through the newshour after 3 recordings. We talk about the No Kings Protests, Joe Rogan souring on immigration, and the quiet war going on the carribbean and what it means for foreign policy. Also, we aren't going to have WWIII so stop asking!
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NewsTranscript
00:00Thank you very much.
02:30Oh, we don't have cameras.
02:36This happens too often when switching between Zoom and Ecamm Live.
02:48See what happens.
02:49There we are.
02:51I'm pushing all the buttons being like, why am I not coming in?
02:53And yeah.
02:54Mm-hmm.
02:54Hello, everyone.
02:59Um, my name is Cameron Cowan.
03:03This is the Cameron Journal NewsHour.
03:06We have a nice, uh, round of, uh, stories for you this evening.
03:14Um, before I start, I want to thank all my Cameron Journal Plus members for checking in, um, with
03:21me this week.
03:22I am so sorry that the newsletter did not come out this weekend.
03:27Uh, it, uh, it, WordPress managed to miss its schedule again.
03:32So the newsletter literally went out, like, right now.
03:37Um, and so, um, it's a, it's a difficult, uh, it's a difficult thing.
03:45I learned an interesting thing about WordPress today, and that was, um, the fact that, uh,
03:52it, um, it doesn't, it will miss its schedule and not do stuff if there's no traffic on the
04:01site, like, at the moment the thing is supposed to trigger.
04:06Um, which was an interesting, interesting thing that I did not, I did not know, um, which
04:14I found a little bit frustrating, sort of thing.
04:19Um, but I tried a fix from chat GPT, and, um, I'm looking at it right now, and it looks
04:25like the fix did not work.
04:27So, um, that's fun.
04:31Um, we love that.
04:33But anyway, big shout-out to Cameron Jewell Plus subscribers.
04:36If you're wondering where the Cameron Jewell newsletter is, um, it should hopefully be
04:41in your inboxes shortly, as I literally sit here trying to make it send out, and actually,
04:49ah, it's Monday, and it's been a Monday.
04:52Uh, yeah, that was an uncomfortable thing to make, because it's supposed to go out on
04:55Saturday.
04:55There's usually a newsletter every Saturday.
04:57If you haven't signed up for the newsletter, go to CameronJewell.com slash newsletter.
05:01And, uh, and, and give, and, and check that out.
05:06If you want to become a Cameron Journal Plus member, make sure to go to CameronJournal.com
05:10slash subscribe, and set up.
05:12It's $45 for the year.
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05:26Good news for you.
05:27So, you can do so at CameronJournal.com slash Substack.
05:31So, uh, with all the housekeeping out of the way, um, I want to start off this evening
05:36by talking about the AWS outage.
05:38So, half the internet isn't working today.
05:41If you're watching this on Twitch, you should be lucky right now, because, again, half the
05:46internet's not working today.
05:47So, um, if you do have something functional online, like even this show, um, you're very,
05:57you're very lucky.
05:58If you're ever wondering all the places you can watch this show, CameronJournal.com slash
06:02NewsHour.
06:03But, yeah, I, I tried, there's a bunch of stuff in the automations that do my social media stuff.
06:10I can't fix any of it right now.
06:12Everything is done.
06:13People can't get into their home security cameras, like AWS powers a lot of things, and
06:19with its outage, it's just kind of, um, it's just kind of a mess.
06:23But, uh, we're here, and on YouTube, so if you, shout out to Google Cloud Services, um,
06:31we're here on YouTube, so you can at least watch us on that.
06:34Um, so, but thank you all for coming this evening.
06:38Um, AWS is out, but we have more important news stories to talk about, and I want to
06:43dive right in to the weekend's No Kings protest.
06:48Let's do this.
06:50Here we are.
06:52And, um, so nationwide, there were protests throughout the whole country, um, protesting against the
07:02Trump administration.
07:03It says here, according to Politico, it's the third mass mobilization since Donald Trump's
07:08return to the White House.
07:09It says here that large crowds of protesters marched and rallied in cities across the U.S.
07:12Saturday for No Kings demonstrations, decrying what participants see as the government's
07:17swift drift into authoritarianism under President Donald Trump.
07:20People carrying signs of slogans such as, nothing is more patriotic than protesting or resist
07:24fascism, packed into New York City's Times Square and rallied by thousands in parks in
07:28Boston, Atlanta, and Chicago.
07:30I did see somewhere else not in this story.
07:33It was 7 million people across 2,700 locations.
07:36So, not necessarily, you know, massive turnout, depending on where you are.
07:42It says demonstrators marched to the Washington and downtown Los Angeles and picketed outside
07:49capitals in several Republican-led states, a courthouse in Billings, Montana, and at
07:52hundreds of smaller public spaces.
07:54Trump's Republican Party despairs of demonstrations as Hate America rallies.
07:58And by Trump's Republican Party, they really mean J.D. Vance.
08:00Anyway.
08:01But in many places, the events looked more like a street party.
08:04There were marching bands, huge banners with the U.S. Constitution's We the People, that
08:07was in L.A., preamble that people could sign, and demonstrators wearing inflatable costumes,
08:11particularly frogs, which have emerged as a sign of resistance in Portland, Oregon.
08:15It was the third mass mobilization since Trump's return to the White House and came against
08:18the backdrop of a government shutdown that has not only closed federal programs and services,
08:22but is testing the core balance of power, as an aggressive executive confronts Congress
08:26and the courts in ways that protest organizers warn are a slide towards authoritarianism.
08:31In Washington, Iraq War Marine veteran Sean Howard said he'd never participated in a
08:35protest before, but was motivated to show up because of what he sees as the Trump administration's
08:39disregard for the law.
08:40He said immigration detentions without due process and deployments of troops in U.S.
08:44cities are un-American, alarming signs of eroding democracy.
08:48I fought for freedom and against this kind of extremism abroad, said Howard, who added
08:51that he also worked with the CIA for 20 years on counterterrorism operations.
08:54And now I see a moment in America where we have extremists everywhere who are, in my
08:58opinion, pushing us into some kind of civil conflict.
09:00Trump, meanwhile, was spending the weekend in his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida.
09:05Quote,
09:05They say they're referring to me as a king.
09:07I'm not a king, unquote, the president said in a Fox News interview that aired early
09:10Friday before he departed for a $1 million per plate MAGA Inc. fundraiser in his club.
09:14The Trump campaign's social media account mocked the protest by posting a computer-generated
09:18video of the president clothed like a monarch wearing a crown and waving from a balcony.
09:22In San Francisco, hundreds of people spelled out no king and other phrases with their bodies
09:27on Ocean Beach.
09:27Haley Wingard, who was dressed as the Statue of Liberty, said she, too, had never been to
09:31a protest before.
09:32Only recently she began to view Trump as a, quote, dictator, unquote.
09:35Quote,
09:35I was actually okay with everything until I found out the military invasion in Los Angeles
09:39and Chicago and Portland.
09:40Portland bothered me the most, because I'm from Portland.
09:42I don't want the military in my cities.
09:43That's scary, Wingard said.
09:45Tens of thousands of people gathered in Portland for a peaceful demonstration downtown.
09:48Later in the day, tensions grew as a few hundred protesters and counter-protesters showed up
09:52at a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building, with federal agents at times firing
09:56tear gas to disperse the crowd and city police threatening to make arrests if demonstrators
10:00blocked streets.
10:01The building has been the site of mostly small nightly protests since June, the reason the
10:05Trump administration is cited for trying to deploy the National Guard troops in Portland,
10:08which a federal judge has at least temporarily blocked.
10:11About 3,500 people gathered in Salt Lake City outside the Utah State Capitol to share
10:14messages of hope and healing after a protester was fatally shot during the city's first
10:18Snow King's March in June.
10:19And more than 1,500 people gathered in Birmingham, Alabama, evoking the city's history of protests
10:23and the critical role it played in the civil rights movement two generations ago.
10:29Quote, it just feels like we're living in an America that I don't recognize, unquote,
10:32said Jessica Yother, a mother of four.
10:33She and other protesters said they felt camaraderie by gathering in a state where Trump won nearly
10:3865% of the vote last November.
10:40It was so encouraging, Yother said.
10:41I walked in and thought, here are my people.
10:43Big rallies like this give confidence to people who have been sitting on the sidelines but
10:46are ready to speak up, Democratic U.S. Senator Chris Murphy said in an interview with the
10:49Associated Press.
10:50While protests earlier this year against Elon Musk's cuts in Trump's military parade drew
10:53crowds, organizers say this one is uniting the opposition.
10:57Top Democrats, such as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Independent Senator Bernie Sanders,
11:01are joining what organizers view as an antidote to Trump's actions.
11:04From the administration's clampdown on free speech with military-style immigration raids.
11:08More than 2,600 rallies were planned Saturday, organizers said.
11:10The National March Against Trump and Musk this spring had 1,300 registered locations,
11:14while the first No King's Day in June registered 2,100.
11:18We're here because we love America, Sanders said.
11:21We're here because we love America, Sanders said, addressing the crowd from a stage in Washington.
11:27He said the American experiment is, quote, in danger, unquote, but under Trump had insisted,
11:31quote, we the people will rule, unquote.
11:34And it goes on to some other small details.
11:37But anyway, those are the protests this weekend.
11:39And this is rather hilarious.
11:42The inflatable costumes thing is kind of funny.
11:46You know, leave it to the left to come up with the most weird way to, you know, protest.
11:52And the thing I love about this mess, this is very Italian, very French-esque.
11:55In a lot of Italian and French protests, you see these big sort of paper mache, plaster masks,
12:00quick, easy to make, all this type of thing.
12:02And I love that our protests now have a European flair sort of thing.
12:10It's a quite nice thing.
12:15And yeah, so it's good.
12:18This is in downtown Seattle in South Lake Union, actually.
12:22So it was an interesting thing.
12:24The protests were nonviolent.
12:26There was no kind of crazy things beyond the usual kerfluffle at the ice detention facility in Portland.
12:33So it was a positive weekend.
12:35And I think it's interesting from a narrative perspective that the narrative is focusing on all the people from the sidelines that are coming out,
12:44all the people from MAGA who are unhappy with the direction are coming out, all this type of thing.
12:48And it actually blends quite well into this story right here from Christopher Webb
12:57and this clip from Joe Rogan, which gets into ICE and Immigration.
13:05Let's watch We'll Talk.
13:07I did not, I did not ever anticipate seeing that on TV on a regular basis.
13:15Me either, man.
13:16Me either.
13:17It's shocking.
13:17It's shocking.
13:18I really thought they were just going to go after the criminals.
13:20I really thought there was enough gang members and enough people, MS-13 members and whatever they were looking for,
13:26that they're wanted.
13:29They would go after those guys.
13:30I'll say authoritarianism.
13:31Yeah.
13:32You see how authoritarianism, when it begins to emerge, it's not like it's, like, non-consensual.
13:42If you've been robbing people for the last 10 years and you're an illegal, you have to leave the country, right?
13:48That makes sense.
13:49Yeah.
13:49But if you've been here for 25 years, you have a family, your kids go to school here, you speak the language, you're just illegal.
13:57But you're a contributing member to the community that, up until now, has been protected.
14:02This is crazy to ask lower-income and middle-income people who are, you know, kind of getting by,
14:09and then all of a sudden you're about to ship them to a country where they've never been.
14:14They haven't been since they were four.
14:16Yeah.
14:16And you're going to pull up their family and pull up, and they've been in the community like that.
14:22That shows no heart, and that's the problem.
14:25Like, you're not going to get any reasonable people to want to go along with that.
14:29Any kind person would look at that and go, this can't be the only way to do this.
14:33Damn right.
14:34But, you see, once authoritarianism starts creeping in, and it makes some inroads, which it's definitely making right now, man.
14:42I mean, I'm not mad.
14:55I'm disappointed.
14:56I'm not surprised that, like, everyone's finally coming around to this, you know, to realizing what's really going on here.
15:10And when it comes to the hardened criminal sort, you're not going to find anybody who's kind of like,
15:15yes, hardened criminals, send them our way.
15:18But I think Joe makes the distinction.
15:21In this way, Joe Rogan continues to be the median voter.
15:24In so much as Joe Rogan makes a great point that people thought, it's like, oh, we're going to gather the gang members and the really bad criminals and get them out of here, and that'll be better.
15:35No one was imagining that they were going to be gathering up, you know, Maria Garcia, who's been in the community for 25 years.
15:41Her friend's wife didn't even know she was an illegal immigrant.
15:44You know, she's been here doing, you know, doing all this type of thing.
15:47She's not been to, you know, whatever country she came from since she was four.
15:51Yeah, no one ever thought, but that's who's getting around it, because the reality on the ground, and if you don't believe me, you can go talk to Homan in Homeland Security about this,
16:01because he's talked about this, the real problem is there aren't necessarily enough of those hardened criminals to gather up.
16:09They've never met the numbers that they were hoping to.
16:11Like, Stephen Miller goes on Fox News and all sports, kind of like, 100,000 immigrants a month.
16:16And the way they've been trying to accomplish that is by raiding the Home Depot parking lot.
16:23And you can say, oh, well, they haven't been here that long.
16:27They don't speak the language, all this type of thing.
16:29Okay, that's fine.
16:30All of this is why Reagan did amnesty in 86.
16:33That's kind of my greater point, is the reason, everyone wonders, how did Reagan, a Republican, do an amnesty in 86?
16:41Because of this exact dynamic here, there were lots of people who, and this even gets into, you know, DACA recipients, all this sort of thing.
16:51The reality is there's a lot of people who showed up here as children, as young adults.
16:57They've been, you know, other than the fact that they were not born on this land, been fine, upstanding citizens, all this type of thing, doing their thing, so on and such forth.
17:08The only real issue is that they don't have legal status in this country.
17:12And most people don't know that's not even actually a crime, it's a civil offense.
17:16The only time it's prosecuted is it's a federal misdemeanor and is very rarely actually prosecuted all the way through.
17:23Most of the time, it's actually something you can, like, be written a ticket for, a citation.
17:30And then you can be deported after that, especially if they find you in an airport or a border crossing or whatever have you.
17:35And that's the way the law is written.
17:37Now, that may be cause for reform.
17:39And certainly maybe we should reform that law and maybe lower the boom a bit.
17:43Immigration is something in which I'm very conservative.
17:46But this dynamic, this situation, is exactly why we got the amnesty in 86.
17:52I say we, I wasn't a part of it, I wasn't even born yet.
17:54Why we as a country had the amnesty in 86 is because of this dynamic.
17:58There were lots of people who, for all intents and purposes, are American, but for paperwork, bureaucracy, if you will.
18:08And that was one of the reasons the amnesty in 86 was so successful.
18:12And there were a lot of people who led really great lives after that because of this exact social dynamic.
18:17The part for me that frustrating is a year ago during the election, it was, we're going to get the immigrants out of here.
18:26We're going to finally clean up the country, solve these problems, you know, get rid of the, make America for America.
18:33America first, then all of a sudden they're finding out.
18:36So, it's like with the Politico story, oh, that's really scary.
18:40Oh, I never thought they'd do this.
18:42Oh, I never thought they'd do that.
18:43This seems authoritarian.
18:47Yeah, we tried to tell you.
18:51Again, I'm not saying that we shouldn't enforce immigration laws in this country.
18:55We most certainly should.
18:56There's a lot of people who are well deserving of being deported.
18:59Hell, the last president who was the king of deportations was Obama.
19:0323 million people in eight years.
19:05I mean, it can be done, especially when you follow a process, look for real criminals, do some old-fashioned investigating police work, not necessarily run around town in an unmarked van with some fellows and grab people off the road.
19:17I mean, there's a way to do it and do it in volume.
19:20Ask the Obama people.
19:21They were real good at it.
19:23You can do this.
19:24And not in a way that's going to overturn the whole country and give authoritarian vibes with troops marching in cities and all this type of thing.
19:31But this is the problem is, and we see this with Viktor Orban in Hungary.
19:38We see this with Erdogan in Turkey is when people get frustrated with, thank you so much for the like.
19:44When people get frustrated with the system, when they get frustrated with institutions not being responsive, when they get frustrated with too many things changing in their country, and someone comes along and says, oh, I'll fix it.
20:00I'm the solution.
20:01And they're kind of like, well, thank God someone's willing to do something.
20:03Let's vote for that guy.
20:04After years of things sort of not happening, it's almost never does that end well.
20:11When your country has reached that point, the person who comes along and is like, I can solve all your problems.
20:17I can fix all these issues.
20:19Everything's going to be great and grand.
20:21Usually, typically, that's not going to end well for the country involved.
20:27That typically is going to end up with a lot of authoritarian crackdowns, limitations of right, limitations of the press and media, all this sort of thing.
20:36That's where that goes.
20:37Now, a lot of people will say, oh, you're going too far.
20:40You're scrying wolf too loud.
20:42It's been nine months.
20:46And Joe Rogan's already saying, well, I didn't think you'd go like this, man.
20:51Well, people tried to tell you, but whatever.
20:55You know, you're already nine months in.
20:58Imagine where we're going to be at next year and the year after that and the year after that.
21:07Thank you so much for the like.
21:10This is for openers.
21:13This is the appetizer.
21:16It can get a whole lot worse.
21:18And it can start to affect, you know, your everyday life as a citizen.
21:24Everyone thought I was crazy when I said I will keep my passport in my handbag at all times.
21:29And everyone thought I was overreacting.
21:32Now, admittedly, I tend to live in an area where I don't think those problems are ever going to really reach us because we kind of live out of the way.
21:37But as a matter of precaution, especially as someone who has out-of-state card plates right now, all this type of thing.
21:44Like, yeah.
21:46You know.
21:48It's, you know, these are things and problems that are actively happening in places that we now have to think about.
21:58And it can get a whole lot worse.
22:00I don't know what he thought was going to happen beyond, oh, we're just going to arrest a bunch of criminals and that'll clean out the immigrants.
22:09It's like, no.
22:11I mean, okay, I get what you're with that.
22:13And yes, I want to arrest the criminals too.
22:14But the reality is when you start this process of, you know, mass deportations and clean everybody out and all this type of thing with no process, with no, you know, real anything to go along with that to make sure they really, you know, do have problems and are real criminals and all this type of thing, then you end up with just kind of any old buddy getting grabbed.
22:36And I think it's also important that for a lot of, for a certain part of the right, led mostly by Stephen Miller, there are these people who believe, you know, in the quote-unquote heritage Americans.
22:48There's definitely some, you know, this country is for the whites undertones that backs up a lot of the messaging and thoughts about this that I think a lot of people don't even really acknowledge because it doesn't get out there enough.
23:00It's not really making it through the algorithm.
23:02But one of the things, like, on Twitter, you don't have to look very far for it to pop up.
23:07You don't have to look very far to see and hear that type of language.
23:10And that's kind of the next logical step.
23:13And this is, you know, it's like in Nazi Germany, when they were arresting the disabled, the homosexuals, the mentally ill, all this type of thing, everyone was kind of like, you know what, it's not so bad, you know?
23:26Yeah, they're kind of a burden, get them out of here.
23:28And then the communists, well, communism is terrible, we don't want to be communists, get rid of them too.
23:33And then it was trade unionists.
23:35Oh, wait, that's my buddy, that's me.
23:38Ooh.
23:40People forget Jews were the last.
23:43By the time the Germans got to the Jews, about four or five other groups, including the Roma, you'll know them better as gypsies, we don't say that word anymore.
23:49But Roma, the Roma, the communists, the mentally disabled homosexuals had all been already sent to camps.
23:56One of the reasons they had to keep building larger camps is because the groups that they were taking were much, much larger.
24:03And so that's how it starts.
24:04So even by the time, you know, Hitler invades Poland in 39, most Jews are still, even in annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia, they're still living in Jewish ghettos and cities where they've been all forced to live.
24:19But the mass removals of, like, in Budapest, in Warsaw, don't begin until 4041.
24:26So from 1933, when he gets to power, to him getting the Jews, takes a while.
24:32There's a lot of years in there where everyone thought, oh, we'll be fine, we'll be fine, we'll be fine.
24:35No.
24:37The reason why we need to be a nation of laws is to make sure that we prevent these exact scenarios from happening.
24:49And my worry is that in the zeal of everyone trying to, you know, clean up this problem and get rid of it once for all,
25:01it has turned into a, oh, oops, looks like we might have gone too far, looks like things might have gotten a little out of control.
25:11Well, yeah, I mean, kind of, but, you know, that's what happens when you let power go unchecked.
25:22And that's, you know, that's the real, the real issue is that you have power that is going, you know, unchecked.
25:31And that's not, that's not a good thing, you know, it's not a good thing at all.
25:37And this is, this is where, um, this is where, you know, maintaining a country of, of laws is so, so, so important.
25:48So, so very important.
25:51And it was kind of funny because the title of the, not the newsletter that I'm still trying to send out as I'm sitting here,
25:57but the one of the week before was called Rule of Law.
25:59Are we going to be a nation of laws?
26:01And that's really, you know, the question is, are we going to be a nation of laws?
26:06Because if we are, then we need to act accordingly.
26:11If, if not, then it's dictatorship, quite simply.
26:16Um, which I don't, I mean, for me personally, I don't really want to live in a dictatorship, but that's just me.
26:23Anyway, enough on that.
26:25Let's move on.
26:26Um, I did find, in lighter news, uh, I did find this very hilarious story.
26:34Um, and that is, uh, Texas State Rep. James Tolerico blames tariffs for high state fare food prices.
26:42It says here that Texas State Representative James Tolerico sparked online debate by attributing steep food prices to the Texas State Fair,
26:48such as $25 turkey legs and $15 funnel cake chicken sandwiches to federal tariffs imposed by Washington politicians.
26:54Critics argue that prices have been elevated for years due to inflation, vendor costs, and dependent pricing,
27:00with fair foods mostly sourced domestically and thus minimally affected by tariffs.
27:04The 2025 fare in Dallas law attendance dropped to 2.4 million visitors from 2.6 million the previous year,
27:09as some families cited affordability concerns.
27:13Uh, someone asked a question, do you think we might have World War III in South instead of Europe?
27:18No, World Wars only happen when great powers think that they can win something specific,
27:25or they think that they're, the gain, the potential gain is so much greater than the potential losses.
27:34Um, no, everyone's trying to think, oh, this is gonna be World War.
27:37Everybody wants a World War so damn bad it's not even funny.
27:39I think just because people want some big traumatic thing to happen so that then there's an after.
27:49You know, they, you know, it's almost, it's like people need that to justify, like, how bad things go.
27:55So there's a destination, there's finality.
27:58That's not how authoritarianism works.
28:01That's, that's not the era that we're in.
28:05This is a long, slow, banal, to borrow a word from Hannah Arendt,
28:15long grind into a system, essentially, of global oligarchy.
28:23I'm gonna be Alex Jones for a little minute.
28:25The global oligarchs!
28:26Like, one of the things that I had mentioned a while ago, to friends only, really,
28:33is, globally, economically, the wealthy incorporations have looted the developed world pretty much as much as they can.
28:46They've extracted all the wealth that there is there.
28:48And so the last kind of cash cow in town is the developed world.
28:52And over the last several years, we've seen privatization of a lot of public services, things,
28:58things sold off to make private investors' money, all this sort of thing.
29:01More so in Europe than here in America, but it's even reached our shores.
29:06And what this amounts to is a massive wealth shift from the public to the private sector.
29:14I mean, bearing in mind, I mean, Elon Musk has 10xed his wealth in a decade.
29:20Okay.
29:22Of the $5 trillion we spent on COVID, $2.9 trillion went into the pockets of the wealthy and asset inflation.
29:31I mean, it's mind-boggling amounts of money.
29:34And I said, I think one of my worries is that when it comes to the exploitation of corporations and the wealthy,
29:43of general society, to enrich themselves, that can't be stopped.
29:47I think Trump is trying to stop it in his own weird way with the tariffs and everything to kind of slow down what's happening.
29:56But I think the ship has already sailed.
29:59The global economy is too integrated to live without globalization.
30:02Despite the fact I saw an email from Peter Zine who said, get used to not having Chinese manufacturing.
30:09Well, Peter, I don't know how you think that's going to happen.
30:14We haven't had a textiles industry in 50 years, so I think we're going to have to keep buying clothes from Vietnam.
30:19Furniture, too.
30:20Oh, and by the way, and I think we're going to be buying electronics from China for a long time.
30:23Like, this is, he's crazy.
30:26But I said, I feel the words to integrate into you can't really undo globalization.
30:30It's been 20 years.
30:32I fear that we can't stop the wealthy from, you know, from convincing the government to sell off everything so they can get richer by it
30:40and essentially get their tax dollars returned to them via wealth extraction.
30:44I don't know that we can stop this now.
30:47And what happens, and you've seen this in Russia and elsewhere,
30:50is that you end up with a society where you have extremely wealthy people at the top who kind of control everything,
30:57and then there's everyone else scraping to get by.
31:00There's no big war.
31:02There's no big collapse.
31:04It's just a long, slow grind to limited rights, limited freedom, and less money, and a lower standard of living.
31:11And my great fear is that we are hurtling towards that at lightning speed.
31:17And that's something that when, you know, like I was talking with someone about my new book,
31:22America's Lost Generation, out now, buy it on Amazon.
31:24When I had this conversation, everyone was like, it's a very sad book.
31:28It's a very depressing book.
31:31Yeah, it is, you know.
31:34So have the lives of many millennials been sad and depressing trying to struggle in, you know,
31:42a global competition for jobs, for housing, for everyone else in an integral, you know.
31:47When the United States was the center of the global economy,
31:51as an average worker trying to navigate that is extremely difficult.
31:55It's wonderful if you're wealthy.
31:56The upside is tremendous.
31:58It's wonderful if you're a VC with deep capital markets.
32:00You're trying to start a business, raise money, all this type of thing.
32:03If you're just a person who needs a job to live, it is a miserable place to be.
32:10And this is why, circling back to like Thomas Piketty in his book on capitalism from so many years ago,
32:15said, in the 21st century, those who derive their wealth from assets will be richer than those who derive their wealth from labor.
32:24And the reality is, people who actually work for a living and get their money from going to a job every day
32:32are going to be increasingly squeezed all over the world.
32:34It's going to be barely enough to sort of keep life.
32:39If you derive your wealth from assets, houses, stocks, all this type of thing,
32:45the number only goes up and to the right.
32:47And this is why that fundamental structural shift is why the wealthy will continue to get wealthier
32:52and the poor will continue to get poorer.
32:53For young people who usually come into this world with no, you usually arrive, you know,
32:58as they need to build a career, they need to build a job, they need to build earnings in order to save,
33:02in order to get assets, all this type of thing, that means they never get a chance, opportunity to do that.
33:07And when you have mass privatization going on, and you have all this wealth being sucked out of the bottom
33:11and towards the top, you have even less opportunity because your wages are depressed,
33:15your cost of living is going up, so your standard of living is going down.
33:19Where do you save money, all this type of thing?
33:23This is the dynamic at play.
33:25And the tariffs are not helping that situation.
33:28But ultimately, no, we're not headed towards World War III.
33:32We're headed towards a long, slow grind of authoritarianism with fewer rights, less wealth, and a lower standard of living.
33:40Greetings. Thank you for watching.
33:42I saw your comment.
33:44So, I know people are coming in and out.
33:47I think my rant, we lost some viewers after that rant, but that's okay.
33:52I wanted to kind of highlight the interesting, we've had Mr. Tolerico, we've had James Tolerico,
33:59we've mentioned him before, and he's running for U.S. Senate, I think against Ted Cruz.
34:07And I will say, his video and messaging and talking about the high tariffs and everything is very interesting,
34:15considering who it's coming from, where it's coming from, and even though I kind of agree with the experts here,
34:21I don't think that, you know, high prices at the Texas State Fair are caused by tariffs.
34:29I think it's funny that he's trying to tie those two things together to be kind of like,
34:34this is an all-American event, but it's not too expensive for normal families.
34:38I mean, from a messaging narrative perspective, absolutely, absolutely brilliant.
34:44Absolutely brilliant.
34:44I want to jump over to this really great tweet by Ruth Ben-Gott.
34:50I love her.
34:52I have for a while.
34:54And we'll start with this story, because Trump has been blowing up gun-running boats, quote-unquote,
35:05in the Caribbean.
35:06And it shows here where ships have been positioned in the Caribbean, in U.S. Southern Command,
35:13and where some of the interdictions, that's the fancy term for it, are called,
35:18what type of bombers and planes they're using, all very technical.
35:21I'm not quite sure why they're bombing boats with B-52s.
35:23That seems like overkill, but here we are.
35:26And so, recently they've blown up a boat, they've blown up a Trinidadian fishing boat.
35:32And it says here that, uh, this is no longer just drilling boats on the run,
35:36this seems to be like a slow drip march to direct armed conflict in the Americas.
35:39Wasn't on my bingo card when we heard the No More Wars America First platform,
35:43but here we are, and everyone is sleepwalking into it.
35:46And the original story is from Ian Ellis, it says here,
35:48the U.S. announced its seventh strike in Southcom, destroying a boat affiliated with the Colombian cartel.
35:53The U.S. has massed 10,000 troops in the region, with most from Puerto Rico, and 12 on Navy ships.
35:58Um, there's a lot of, I've gotten a lot of questions from people about the,
36:05oh, we're going to invade Venezuela and cause regime change and all this sort of thing,
36:10and it's kind of like, not yet.
36:12You don't invade Venezuela with 10,000 troops.
36:16Call me when there's 100,000 sitting in Panama.
36:18But, I think this idea that we, you know, should do more and have more conflict in North and South America,
36:26um, is definitely difficult, especially in South America with, with, with the drug cartels.
36:30And Ruth's comment here, I think, is so prescient about where I think Trump is taking foreign policy.
36:37And I think she's absolutely spot on.
36:39She says, all part of reducing America to a second-rate power, so Xi and Putin can carve up Asia and Eurasia.
36:46U.S. military was deterrent for autocrats, so the U.S. will increasingly focus military operations on Latin America
36:51and on domestic forever war coin, that's counterintelligence-style engagement, at home.
36:59Um, and I love the top comment because it said, yeah, in Canada, Greenland, Panama, Argentina,
37:05big loan they won't repay, Venezuela, Colombia, isn't it clear what's going on here?
37:09Renamed the Gulf to Gulf of America.
37:11It's not a stretch to think Trump thinks he can take over North and South American continents.
37:16And, um, and so this, I think, there's definitely, and this has been true since the Obama administration,
37:23Trump didn't start this.
37:24There has definitely been, I think, a retrenchment to home.
37:27I think someone in the comments, someone mentioned, oh, we're going to finally do the Monroe Doctrine.
37:31Um, you know, where we start annexing South and Central America.
37:36Um, I, I think, I think it, I think the strategy is definitely to have more control in our backyard
37:43to focus on our landmass, North and South America, and kind of leave the Eurasian problems
37:50to Eurasia.
37:51And, obviously, the two preeminent powers, well, three, three preeminent powers on that
38:00continent are going to be Russia, China, and the EU.
38:03The problem with the EU is they don't have a centralized military.
38:06And the only, there's only about three countries with anything that one can describe as a real
38:11military, and that's the UK, France, and Italy, but mostly naval, not on land, um, sort of
38:18thing.
38:18So, you know, as, as Asia, as China and Russia split up Asia, they're both going to be salivating
38:25at what's going to come of Europe.
38:26And, obviously, Putin wants a great deal more influence in Europe, and he would like a lot
38:30of the old Soviet Union back.
38:31I would be very worried if I'm Poland, and you can tell they're worried because they're
38:35put up fencing, and they have checkpoints, and they have locked that country down.
38:39Um, but I think, yes, I mean, there's been a lot of talk in international relations circles
38:44for quite some time that the United States is going to kind of pull back from the globe
38:48and focus on North and South America, our own neighborhood, because that's going to be
38:53the future, and it's cheaper, and it's better, and that's, I mean, one, probably one of the
38:58one thing Peter Zain has said that I kind of agree with is, there's this big pullback.
39:02Trying to run sea lanes for the whole planet and make globalization happen, all this type
39:06of thing, is very expensive.
39:07I think there is going to be a bit of a, a bit of a pullback, and this is definitely,
39:12you know, part of, part of, of that as, as well.
39:17I don't think it's going to be as easy as they think so.
39:20It's very obvious Mexico is not interested in being annexed.
39:23I think most of South America would like to not be annexed either, so I'm not really
39:27quite sure what the end game is for this, but it is, um, uh, it is certainly, um, it
39:37is certainly a strategy, and I think it is emblematic of where the Trump administration
39:41is taking, uh, is taking foreign policy.
39:44So, it's, it's an interesting, it's an interesting thing to look at, um, with what assets they
39:53have in the region and what the growing capabilities are, you know, right here in, uh, you know,
40:01in, in, in, in the early 20th century, this was definitely an area of operations, especially
40:06once we seized Cuba, um, from Spain, but, uh, yeah, it's, it, it will be very interesting
40:15to see what the, um, what the overall, what the long-term effects of all of this are going
40:22to, are going to be, but I think, I think Ruth has it right, you know, with the, the U.S.
40:29military was a deterrent for autocrats, and as we pull back towards our own neighborhood,
40:34there's going to be a lot less deterrent for that, and that should worry us all.
40:40So, in an interesting sort of funding scandal, I found this tweet from Richard Hanani quite
40:46helpful, and there's a New York Times story, too.
40:49It says here that Trump targets Democratic districts by halting billions during shutdown.
40:54It says here, two weeks into the government shutdown, the Trump administration has frozen
40:57or canceled nearly $28 billion that had been reserved for more than 200 projects primarily
41:01located in Democratic-led cities, congressional districts, and states, according to analysis
41:06of the New York Times.
41:07The amount of effective funding for Republican districts, 14, $703 million, Democrat districts,
41:1287, $27.4 million.
41:14Each of these infrastructure projects had received federal aid, sometimes after officials spent
41:18years pleading in Washington, only to see that money halted as President Trump has looked
41:22to punish Democrats over the course of the fiscal stalemate.
41:25The Times conducted its analysis by examining federal funding records, which include details about
41:30the city and state where each grant recipient is based.
41:32The projects include new investments in clean energy, upgrades to the electric grid, and
41:35fixes to the nation's transportation infrastructure, primarily in Democratic strongholds such as
41:39New York and California.
41:42In some cases, recipients have started to receive portions of the federal aid, only to become
41:46casualties in a funding battle that has no end in sight.
41:49Mr. Trump's aides have offered a series of explanations for the administration's decision
41:52to pause or terminate grants, claiming in some cases the spending would have been wasteful
41:56or in conflict with the President's priorities.
41:57Since returning to office, Mr. Trump has been particularly aggressive in cutting federal
42:01investments to combat climate change.
42:03But the budgetary moves coincide with the President's public pledges to use the shutdown
42:06to slash spending favored by Democrats.
42:08He's described the federal stoppage as an unprecedented opportunity to make some acts
42:12cuts permanent.
42:13Many Democrats said the announcements fit a broader pattern at the White House where
42:16Mr. Trump has claimed vast authority to reprogram the nation's budget, even though
42:19the Constitution gives that power to Congress.
42:21In doing so, Democratic lawmakers said the result could harm their cities and states, upending
42:25work that would have helped residents, regardless of the political party.
42:28The White House did not respond to requests for comment.
42:31I thought it was certainly an interesting thing and idea.
42:37In every shutdown, this always happens.
42:40I think it's interesting kind of how outsized it all is.
42:44I think part of that could be these places tend to be populous and tend to have more things
42:50going on, looking for more federal dollars.
42:53Ergo, if you're looking to cut things you don't have to pay out during a shutdown, it ends
42:59up concentrating itself in California, the West Coast, Chicago, New York area, into New
43:08England, all this sort of thing.
43:10It could be incidental.
43:11It feels intentional.
43:12And I think people always focus on how it feels far more than how it's actually, you know,
43:22perceived sort of thing.
43:24So, oh, I forgot to put the video thing back on, so it's just me yakking away.
43:31But we're going to have to watch a video, so let me put us back onto that.
43:38Here we go.
43:39So, let me set this clip up a little bit.
43:42So, we found, there was a 60-minute story, the DOJ has done some investigation, or the
43:49DOJ has been investigated, rather, and it says that they found 35 cases in which judges
43:53have specifically said what the government is providing is false information.
43:57It might intentionally be false information, including false sworn declarations time and
44:00again, says Ryan Goodman, law professor at New York University.
44:03So, the Trump administration obviously has been doing a lot of work in the courts, a lot
44:08of prosecutions, a lot of cases.
44:09A lot of things happening in the courts.
44:11This investigation has found that perhaps the DOJ does not have it together as much
44:17as people might have thought it did.
44:20So, let's watch the clip.
44:22So, the judges are saying some incredible things.
44:26Ryan Goodman is a law professor at New York University who heads a nonpartisan law journal.
44:31His team has analyzed hundreds of suits filed against the administration, and he didn't imagine what
44:39judges were saying to the Trump Justice Department.
44:42We found over 35 cases in which the judges have specifically said what the government is providing
44:48me is false information, it might be intentionally false information, including false sworn declarations time and again.
44:56In court records compiled by Goodman, Democratic and Republican appointed judges are critical of the Trump Justice
45:04Department's work.
45:05Highly misleading, said one judge.
45:08A serious violation of the court's order, wrote another, and a third warned, trust that had been earned over generations has been lost in weeks.
45:20This isn't the way things normally proceed?
45:22It's not.
45:23In fact, I would say for some of the cases that we're looking at, maybe that would happen once
45:28every 10 years.
45:30Who gets hurt by this?
45:32The one entity or person or institution that gets hurt the most is the Justice Department.
45:37So, I was quite surprised when I came across this story.
45:49I hope Barry Weiss doesn't screw up this type of journalism at 60 minutes because this is no easy thing to do and this is, you know, the type of journalism that we need.
46:02It is, well, for one, providing false information to a court, especially a federal judge, even as a prosecutor, is a cause for, you know, being sanctioned, being disbarred, you know, you can be found in contempt of court.
46:21It's a quite serious thing.
46:22You can do many things in a courtroom but lie to a judge during a case is not even in the top 1,000 things that you can do.
46:30And when I came across the story that they were investigating all these cases against the administration and the government was doing this, I was really appalled.
46:39And I went and watched the greater clip, which I'm not going to play for you, and it just gets so much worse.
46:45And that last quote is so stark.
46:48Trust that has been earned over generations has been lost in weeks.
46:52And I think the only good thing about this, not only it being made public, because people won't care about this, but I think the fact that judges are figuring this out makes the legal...
47:07getting stuff through the legal system of the administration so much harder.
47:12It makes the job so much harder.
47:14Now, I think that can be good for some things, maybe not good for others, but they're making their lives unnecessarily difficult.
47:20And one has to wonder, if they're doing all of this, maybe the case they don't have is that good, but they're supposed to go win it anyway.
47:30And so they're doing, you know, they just turn, in the face of not having a case against who's suing them, they're just resorting to dishonesty.
47:41And, you know, if we needed another reason to not be a huge fan of Pam Bondi and the DOJ and all this type of thing, this is quite stark.
47:50I would encourage you, if you're very interested in this story, to head over to YouTube to the 60 Minutes channel and watch the greater segments, because it's quite stark.
47:59Traditionally, for the government, the federal government doesn't even bring a case, it used to be, unless they were sure that they would win.
48:07In the case of the government being sued, one of the reasons people tend not to sue the government is because they come with all the evidence, all the receipts, everything in a row.
48:15And if you're, if you're the person suing the government and your case isn't airtight, the government will have you, will destroy you in the better part of a half hour.
48:26So, we're now seeing a major departure from that, to where they're showing up with whatever, probably produced by AI, with whatever, and finding, you know, judges complaining to be kind of like, this isn't good, this isn't right, go home, do your homework again, all this type of thing.
48:41I mean, like, it's, it's a quite, it's a quite stark and shocking, and shocking thing.
48:47So, in closing, I'd encourage you to go, uh, to go watch that.
48:50So, um, anyway, so I did three recordings today for the show, this is my fourth time talking, and my voice is bye-bye, Birdie.
49:01So, we're gonna stop a little early, I wanna thank everyone for watching, I really appreciate it.
49:06Thank you for bearing with me through technical issues.
49:08If you are a newsletter subscriber, you should finally have the newsletter in your inbox, it looks like it finally went out.
49:14That only took three days.
49:16Um, so, so sorry for that.
49:17Um, today's interview is so good.
49:21I, um, today's interview, I think, we had Chloe Anagnos on Friday, and today's interview, we had Chloe Anagnos last week, we had Michael Stockholm, and then today we had, um, oh, Mark, uh, Hank Quentz, which is a very interesting interview.
49:38Um, I had some very fascinating conversations with people today, including a big main, um, a big mainstream author named J.D. Barker, who writes thrillers, and he's with, uh, with, he's with, uh, he has an imprint at Simon & Schuster, and he published it with HarperCollins.
49:53So, that's a very exciting conversation I had today, it'll be out towards the end of this, this year.
49:56But, like I said, we have self-publishing with Hank Quentz, we get into all the self-publishing writing stuff this week, um, so that's a lot of fun.
50:03Um, my name is Cameron Cowan, this is the Cameron Journal News Hour, you can catch me on social media at Cameron Cowan or at Cameron Journal on all your favorite platforms.
50:12Please make sure to subscribe to the newsletter at Cameron Journal.com, um, sent up for the newsletter, it'll hopefully be to you on time, on Saturday, and, uh, we'll catch up with you next week, this is the News Hour, I do it every Monday at 7, so come on by, tell your friends, thank you so much everyone, I will see you next week, good night.
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